Conversion Rate Optimization--Which Tools Are Best?

Conversion Rate Optimization, or CRO, is the process by which performance marketers improve on desired actions, such as clicks on an offer, open rates of an email, downloads of an app, or purchases in a store. Marketers look to measure these actions, and use the measurements to help optimize outcomes. Any incremental improvement has the potential to create a huge return, making CRO a lucrative practice for companies of all sizes. On average, companies are spending as much as $2,000 a month on CRO tools. It is important to pinpoint tools that work best for your company, considering a monthly investment that large.

A recent study by Venture Beat surveyed nearly 3,000 CRO tool users. It studied CRO tool penetration data from over 3 million US websites, and compared vendor websites, pricing structures, and capabilities. After analyzing 9 major CRO tools across 36 vendors, it outlined the best CRO practices. Let’s take a look at the results.

Real Results

The Venture Beat survey found that only two of the 36 CRO tools failed to create large returns. Only five percent of the nearly 3,000 marketers surveyed did not generate ROI. Conversely, the survey shows that average ROI is 223 percent. The survey also highlights that 173 marketers gain returns higher than 1,000 percent, an almost mind blowing stat. What do these findings suggest?

Optimize Instead of Buy

Stewart Rogers, the author of the study, breaks down these fantastical returns: “If each customer has a lifetime value of $1,000, and doubling your conversion rate leads to an additional 200 customers per year, the return on investment of your CRO tool is a whopping $200,000 return from a $6,000 spend.” What does this mean? For a mere fraction of the price of “buying” actions through advertising campaigns, a company can increase their ROI exponentially by optimizing their current setup. Rogers drives the point home by stating, “Other than the cost of the tool, CRO is about taking existing traffic and improving conversions from it, rather than buying more traffic through advertising. It is much cheaper to optimize 2,000 visits per day and increase the conversion percentage from 10 percent to 20 percent than it is to buy an extra 2,000 visits.”